What Cats Can Teach You About Empathic Game Design

I'm gonna have you all here so I'm gonna go ahead and get started this is what cats can teach you about empathic game design I know it's a weird title it's also great my name is Willem I am the founder and CEO of a little company called Mew into me basically we make video games for cats I'm gonna get more into that in a second let's get started with the talk first I'm gonna start with a moment that I think all of you are familiar with and I want to do a little exercise here I want you to I'm gonna read this story and then once I finish reading it I want you to raise your hand if you've had a moment like this okay and participate come on it's more fun that way here we go so this is from the art of game design it's a good book if you haven't read it there was once a racing game that was about halfway through development when the client came in for a review after toying with the prototype for a few minutes he looked at the team and said these cars need more chrome the lead engineer was panicked the performance

was tough as it was an adding shiny chrome meant more drain on an already overworked CPU he could have said yes and he could have said no but instead he said the only wise thing why why do the cars need more chrome and what the client said was surprising well as I was playing I kind of felt like the cars weren't as fast as they should be I know changing the car speeds would probably be a lot of work for you guys so I was thinking that if you just put more chrome on the cars well it would make them look faster okay do this with me how many people have had a moment like this right everyone okay so communication with the client communication with the user communication inter-team is difficult and fails a lot of the time I'm just gonna get straight to the point because I can be a very blunt person my thesis for this talk is basically that relying on that verbal communication is making you a worse game designer that there are so many moments where unless you're digging deeper and actually getting to

the bottom of what somebody is saying you're going to miss out and design something worse all right so to give you some context this is Mew and me this is the little company that I started back in 2017 as all the best companies go it was so just as a fun side hobby you'll be seeing a lot of my cat Fez he's my first indoor cat and my first cat were who was a single cat nobody's so I felt guilty I made him some games people thought it was cool it got more serious to tell you about the product so that so that this talk makes a little more sense these are automatic games for tablets that you leave on for your animal while you're out of the house vacation or work or whatever these games automatically cycle throughout the day you just leave it running and they're experimenting and learning about your cat while they do so they're tracking that data and showing you that data giving you that connection to your animal that you wouldn't have had before so this is our first prototype it is Koko's based if you know what Koko's is so that means it runs on web so you're

opening up a website to open this up it is entirely designed because we had some people who were watching YouTube videos putting on YouTube videos of birds and stuff like that and so I was like okay I'll fill that hole right so take a second here do you think that this worked you don't need to say just think okay here's our first user tester so that's my cat that's Fez my little dude he is the to this day one of the least engaged cats that I have ever tested with which is just so typical so yes it did not go very well this first test did not go very well and as I said this is a hobby at this point it's not working for the one purpose that I was building this for to keep Fez company to give him something to do so I started doing it a

little bit more seriously I start testing with some actual users and I just sent it around some friends and family still very hobby esque nine people tested this nine cats tested this it's a web prototype no actual physical interaction no touch to cats watch the device one cat interacts doesn't really stay engaged so this leads us to a 33% engagement I don't know if that's okay maybe 33% of your if you can hit 33% of your target audience maybe you're doing all right but we knew we could do better 33% is not exciting and this led us to our first discovery this is just standard play testing at this point right which is that cats get bored without feedback it makes a lot of sense if you think about your own human motivations when you are fighting a big bad boss if the big bad boss doesn't lose HP when you touch it why are you fighting the big bad boss right unless you're masochistic maybe maybe you're a Dark Souls fan so cats get bored without feedback we knew we had to

give them some form of touch interaction this is also I don't think Laura is in the audience but we talked to somebody else who had built some cat games and they tipped us off that cats actually think they're hunting while they are playing we're like okay we need them to think they're hunting so we're gonna build some new prototypes we're gonna make them touch based so that way they'll actually get some interaction we'll get to kill the prey and and just for the sake of testing we made three different prototypes all a little bit different we were kind of hoping we were gonna see like cat segments and we went and tested these prototypes so here's footage of a couple of these tests once again don't do it verbally if you think this worked well the answer is kinda yeah it went better so this is a touch prototype now the art is still pretty much the same we went to cat

cafes we were getting a little bit more serious here and we had of the 29 cats we tested on seven cats only watch and then separate segment six cats actually engage actually attack the device zero cats gave us their thoughts so it's getting better six plus seven out of twenty nine we're looking at 45% and engagement now that's that's good right forty five percent engagement overall is pretty good now the problem with this number is that we were entirely focusing on analytical data right you can't communicate with the cat you can't be like hey is it better now so we went talk to users and the users told us something very important it was not getting better of the of the users we talked to the pretty much unanimous answer was that watching doesn't count that a cat sitting and watching this device even though to us make sense is some form of stimulation it's like looking out of window maybe to the users it doesn't actually count this is a video game they want to see some physical action right so our actual

engagement is like 20% much less exciting now around this time we had gone to a conference called wisdom 2.0 if you don't know it it's pretty interesting little thing sort of goes over the emerging conscious landscape of business and we saw this woman there named Danielle cretak she is the head of the empathy lab at Google her whole thing is that she thinks you can use empathy to improve Google's products and more interestingly improve their AI so she's trying to learn about empathy so that she can make her a I better and she brought up empathic design emotional based design and we thought that was kind of interesting so we went looking we did some research if you googled empathic design this is probably the example that you would run into so this is this Italian company named Milano they make all kinds things but they decide to enter the Baby Bottle marketplace they immediately start testing in homes so the the

definition for empathic design if you didn't see it up there is experiencing what your end user experiences with your end user and as far as definitions go that's not that much different from standard play testing and I'm going to talk about that more so they go and they do in-person tests with kids and in-person tests with parents and with them they bring some child behaviourists and just do some of their own research and they start noticing something pretty quickly one intellectually they notice that no one prototype seems to really work for all the kids and through this the child behaviourists that they have and through the information that they know they start to identify that different developmental stages for children simply need different bottles the next thing they notice is more emotional they're talking to parents this is more unexpected through the parents they're trying to figure out what features what products are going to get the parents excited right and what they discover is ultimately the thing they actually care about the thing that the parents actually care about is very emotionally

based it is that they want their kids to be independent in this specific example they want their kids to be using cups right and they want to get their kids to using a cup as fast as possible because then they can feel good and special and their kid is independent so they have this intellectual side and they have this emotional side and they combine it to make a really simple solution they create three different baby bottles each one for a different developmental stage each one moving more towards using a cup so I was like okay yeah that's cool I like it a little more in-depth than the standard playtesting how does it apply to game design and that was when I found empathy mapping and from anything else that you might take away from this talk this is by far the most useful tool that I have found really really straightforward really simple there are more complicated examples if you wanted to go looking I found this to be adequate all you do you make a square per user test per user okay in the center you put a picture of your user maybe not an 8-bit dude and you put their name that way you just keep them a

little more human you're thinking more about the user and less about the numbers and during this test you'll record everything they're saying doing thinking and feeling if you're looking at a standard user test I would say 90% of what you're actually gonna be recording is probably on the left side of that square you're gonna be thinking about what they're actually saying to you and what they're doing right and if they said hey I'm kind of feeling defeated you might write that down but most of the time you're not going to spend the moment to get in depth there emotionally and that's why I love this tool it's so straightforward but it forces you to experience things a little bit more emotionally okay here's the problem I'm designing games for cats and of the four categories that is in this empathy map we think the empathy map is cool we're like okay that might work but of the four categories three of them rely on verbal communication so the only thing that we actually get out of our play test with cats is what they're doing

right the only thing we can actually experience with our cat is what they're actively engaging with and how they're actively engaging but we have no idea why so communication is our big problem here verbal communication has broken down we cannot use it and therefore we're pretty weak game designers we got a fourth of what a standard game designer might get so understanding has to replace communication this was our approach we decided yeah okay we have no idea what the cats thinking and we'll never be able to confirm that at least not in the foreseeable future but we can learn a lot more about them and get more in depth just like that Milano example so we did three things one we did a lot of research if you need a good book on cats cat sense and cat wise to my favorites we found a lot of experts some cat behaviorists who we still work with today and then we just spent a lot of time with them and that's your standard user testing so from the research we discovered some really important things about cat vision one is they're semi colorblind they have poor vision from within about a foot away from their face which fun fact for you if you ever bring something close to a cat's face you'll notice at some point it stops actually

looking and its whiskers come forward that is to compensate for that lack of vision they're feeling with their whiskers instead of actually seeing they are motion based as far as vision goes and they see at 60 frames a second is some high fidelity cats the experts they confirmed that watching is some form of engagement it's like looking out of a window or watching TV it's something some form of mental stimulation and vision is only part of hunting so a vision is a not an insignificant part of hunting for cats but smell and hearing especially are super important and then spending time with cats we had some interesting moments here so one just a fun fact again we found that different cats actually do prefer different kinds of games so at some point maybe next year I'll tell you about my cat segmentation guide and the other thing was we had very few like maybe three cats that we had this really interesting weird moment with so I'm gonna step back to the empathy map and try to show you why it's a useful tool so these cats these like

literally maybe three cats we're interacting we're noticing movement we're responding to movement we're attacking and completely missing the prey and the first time that have we were like oh that's a broken cat you know but it happened two more times and so if you this is a hyper simplified empathy map just to be clear they're normally covered in chicken scratch you want that to be the case but with this hyper simplified map if we're just mapping out that one cat and of course taking liberties because it's a cat we're noticing that it is missing the screen when it attacks right we are definitely seeing that they're feeling this sense this predatory behavior they're actually attacking and they definitely think there's movement they're responding to it but what it's saying is where is it it's missing the prey it's sometimes completely missing the device it's really weird so I'm gonna give you a second here again this is the original prototype nothing new

here given the information that we've learned about cats and the research that we did can you try to tell me in your head what you think is going wrong with this prototype yeah basically our art style was awful so we were relying really heavily leaning really heavily on this cats think their hunting thing and so if the cat thinks it's hunting then we want it look as much like it's hunting right we want these really realistic art styles it was what we thought was a strength because all the other cat games are really cute and stupid looking I mean if you make that game so sorry take that back so we learned a couple things from our research and applied it to a new prototype one was we had to simplify the heck out of our art style we completely took out a lot of the textures we made the textures really minimal we made the foreground and background

really easy to differentiate and then one of the more important things is we did color blind studies so cats see in a particular way that's kind of hard to put your finger on but is pretty similar to red colorblind people so we just used red color button filters and you can see now that that foreground and background blend together and that the actual thing is supposed to be interacting with really clearly stands out and that worked really well we tested once again on 42 cats still cat cafes some people in person 11 of these cats are now sitting and watching 18 cats once again this is a separate segment are actually engaging actually attacking the device 0 cats told us why they like to know so to compare those numbers that meant that our percent watch didn't really change but our percent engage went from 20 percent to 43 percent and these are of course smallish numbers hard to really use this as hard evidence but still we're looking at twice the engagement okay so here's

where I get a little more interesting a little more applicable to you if it works for cats it's probably work for people too right so we started doing this exact same empathy mapping emotional design with our people with our humans and the first thing we did was we started talking to them if you have verbal communication you might as well use it and it didn't go so hot right at first this is from a woman named Kristen she is our absolute super user she's a foster cat mom has tested somewhere between 60 and 80 cats with our tablet by herself she's amazing and what she said about our data screen is that she doesn't use it but she likes it she tells people about the app so doesn't be more clear make sure you understand we have this app that is running automatically tracking what your cat is up to and then our whole selling point the whole thing that we thought was really cool is that it teaches you about this cat right we were like yeah that's awesome users weren't using it so let's step

back to our empathy map again once again hyper simplified but what we're hearing from Kristin is that first of all she plays in person this is an automatic app that's like our whole thing and she's playing in person she's switching the games manually she's actually getting annoyed that it automatically switches sometimes she is thinking yeah the date is neat and I put that in parenthesis for a very specific reason it's neat you know it's worth looking at it's like yeah that's kind of cool that the cat was active at 2:00 p.m. but I have no actual connection to that information right she's sang and continuing to say that watching doesn't count which sucks and she's feeling and this is where the I'm not convinced I would have gotten here without this empathic design she's saying she's feeling that she misses her cat and that alone is not very novel but what that Linda bleeding into was pretty important and was a huge pivot for what we were building we were selling an intellectual

product something that tracks data teaches you about your cat to emotional people so these are people that care desperately about their cats they care so much about their cats that they're sitting in a room listening to a guy talking about them right now and I don't just mean that cat people are emotional everybody is emotional we are emotional beings right Simon senex one of the most famous TED talks to date and his whole thing is that people don't buy what you do they buy why you do it right they buy the emotional connection and so what we were scratching at was a way to negate the guilt that you had about leaving your cat alone we are scratching at some emotion there but we weren't really empowering it we were giving them this intellectual hook we're like yeah you can learn about your cat rather than actually giving them the emotional things that they need from their animal this like fluffy love right everything everything that a person actually cares about with their cat or with any animal so we came up some solutions tried to empower them first thing we did this is the least exciting one we tried to convince them that watching count this is very MVP solution right

here so it's just a pop-up that appears at the beginning try to instruct you the next thing we did and this is my favorite name for a settings screen that I've ever created in my life is the parental controls so we empower the user to play the app use the app however they want so they can turn on and off the automatic capability they can turn on and off which games actually run and yes prey squishing means prey death we literally had to PG if I our app if users asked for it we had people complaining about killing mice and then the last one these are emotional people right then the last one is we didn't want to throw out the data entirely because it seemed like people were sharing it due to that I'm that like interesting factor like this is kind of cool this is kind of neat this is unusual but no one's really using it it doesn't have the emotional connection that it needs so where is where is that middle ground that solution between intellectualism and emotionalism for us it was basically to take a picture of

your cat's art when it's engaging when you're away or of the cat itself through the camera and then just to email it to the user so you're sitting at home are you sitting at work or wherever and missing your cat you need some fluffy love and you get an email and that says hey Fez ders played the game and look at this amazing DaVinci artwork that he just created so these are our people results this is why human centered design works this is why emotional design works this is about 400 beta testers who are surveyed like right before release of the 400 or so people we're having over 75% of them call it high-quality at least for an MVP product this is a little bit of data about a month after release we're seeing pretty great word-of-mouth here and then to talk about the cats again because I like cats if you didn't notice why cats enter design work but really just why emotional design works of the hundred and twenty four users that were actually

tracking who have signed up we've had two thousand games played and over thirty thousand kitty taps or individual interactions where the cat is tapping the screen interestingly here we are seeing each of the games have a pretty healthy population of cat to play it so we are seeing that cat segmentation and then this is what's actually really exciting and I breathe such a sigh of relief at this moment so upon pulling the data and looking at all of the individual games that have been played we're seeing 62% of games have at least some interaction so 62% engagement and this is pretty much the same prototype that people were playing I was playing in person at that 45% now at 62 this is not also including cats who watch because we can't track that right so take this with a grain of salt because it's very possible humans are playing this but you know we actually figured that's no problem we will want to differentiate but we actually figure that's no problem engagement is engagement right okay so you've sat

through a whole lot of stuff I'm gonna give you a reward I know why you're here it's cute cats so a another interesting fact here is you can see that most of these cats are really getting excited are young young cats are consistently our most engaged animals so the joke I always make is cats or Millennials - okay alright so these are my key takeaways for this one is and this is something you all know but everybody still falls into this trap all the time is to empower their use-cases right you have to leave your ego out of design you can suspect what your users want but ultimately you're designing for them you're not designing for you we had so many pivots that I would not have called without using my without experimenting with my users the second is to research your target audience that's not something I really thought of doing and I find a lot of people a lot of my own students don't choose target audiences right that's a very newbie

mistake make sure you've got your audience and then research them learn about them find experts if there are experts and then three is to use empathy mapping it is such a simple straightforward tool and it forces you to get deeper with the users and find things that you may not have found but really what I'm hoping I've convinced you have by this point is to spend the time to understand your user and not just talk to them that's it thank you so we have six minutes for questions the feel free to reach out to me through email I also write about weird stuff like this on my blog I'm gonna hang out here until 30 minutes and then I'll head over to 204 and hang out there if anyone wants to talk to me individually or or doesn't get a question in so yeah feel free so you said there's a couple of limitations that cats have one is how they can't really see things that are a foot away from their face a color

blindness and then refresh rate or how fast they see have you got any metrics on how they work with different devices what is the best device for them don't play the easy games on you're talking about like different tablets yes actually I don't that's an interesting one I haven't I haven't checked in on that that's a curious question what I keep saying about the tablets is that it's not really the ideal solution it's just the accessible one everybody has tablets and so many people have tablets they don't use anymore so eventually we'd actually like to step into physical physical stuff physical toys that kind of do the same thing alright our adult cats better than kittens at your game or adult cats so we're we're actually working with the VCA to do a study on all of this which is amazing but so we find that pretty universally adult cats at best are gonna sit and watch there are definitely some cats that'll play this is a total shot

on the dark but my guess there is something to do with plasticity basically the the cats have already cats pretty much established their personality by like one and a half years in and so if they haven't experienced a tablet and this is a fun you know toy within a year and a half they probably just it just doesn't get learned later in life that was a very good answer that gets rely on earring when hunting did you guys try to introduce ants to maybe early engage with the game yes I neglected to mention that in fact I meant to my sound designer sitting right there hi Matt so we hired a professional sound designer to try to make 3d enabled sounds we did see some engagement increase from that another one have you tried it with big cats No one day we need some big tablets anybody

else cool so I'm gonna hang out in 2a for like I said I'll be there if anyone wants to talk otherwise thank you for coming [Applause]